Yangon - A United Nations rapporteur arrived in Yangon Sunday to discuss human-rights concerns, diplomatic officials said.

New York - The UN Security Council Thursday extended the joint peacekeeping mission to Sudan for one year, while at the same time rejecting demands by Libya and South Africa to defer the arrest warrant for Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir.

Prolonged by lengthy diplomatic wrangling, the council's 15 members agreed with a large majority to merely note concerns voiced by the African Union (AU) against al-Bashir's possible prosecution.

The United States abstained from the vote in protest. US Ambassador Alejandro Wolf said voicing concerns against the arrest warrant issued by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague would send the "wrong signal" to Sudan's president.

London, July 30 : The United Nations has admitted that five million pounds of aid intended for Burmese cyclone survivors has been skimmed off by banks run by the country''s military junta.

The missing money is likely to have lined the pockets of the ruling generals and their business cronies.

The scam, which is still occurring, involves forcing the UN to buy the local currency, the Kyat, at above the market rate by changing money through government backed Foreign Exchange Certificates (FEC).

A dollar currently buys around K 1,100 while a "one dollar" FEC only buys K880.

New York - The government in Myanmar has made "quite a lot of progress" in post-Cyclone Nargis reconstruction efforts since the disaster struck in May, the top UN humanitarian affairs official said Monday.

John Holmes returned to New York following a three-day visit to Myanmar, saying he saw a return to normalcy in areas affected by the devastating cyclone, which left more than 140,000 dead and missing people. Some 2.5 million people still need assistance to cope with the disaster's aftermath.

Holmes said there was no room for complacency because of the magnitude of the destruction.

New York - The United Nations mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) said Friday its power to administer the former Serb province has practically disappeared after the government in Pristina instituted its constitution last month.

Lamberto Zannier, the new head of UNMIK, told the UN Security Council in New York that the ethnic Albanian-led Kosovo government has sought to assume powers and responsibilities of a "sovereign state" since the "Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo" entered into force on June 15.

New York  - The UN Security Council cancelled a meeting scheduled for Thursday on the dispute over the Thai-Cambodia border at the request of the Phnom Penh government while talks were being held by the two countries.

It was Cambodia that requested a debate by the 15-nation council. But the two countries' foreign ministers were trying to sort out their differences and Phnom Penh said the bilateral consultations had just started.

"We have cancelled the meeting pending the bilateral talks," Vietnam's Ambassador Le Luong Minh told reporters. Vietnam is holding the rotating council presidency for July.